What We Know About Baudelaire
by zandra-x
Summary: Inspired by the episode, "She" when Angel seeks to hide from pursuers by acting like a docent in a museum.


**What We Know About Baudelaire**

Being long-lived himself, he appreciated the different path to immortality his old acquaintances had taken. As long as paint and canvas held up they would be strutting about the Tuileries and there were reproductions enough so that if the original turned to dust (like he would one day), the image could live on for pasting on greeting cards and tee-shirts. So maybe some were more immortal than others.

Angel remembered Paris. Life among the degenerates. How those bohemian artistes thought themselves the last word in depravity! They took drugs to make themselves insensate; they drank enough to make them vomit in the streets; they lived with women who weren't their wives. Such debauchery. How Angelus and Darla laughed at them while whiling away the daylight hours behind shuttered windows.

Darla, though, had a weakness for the smoky cafes and bright chatter. Her special pet was Baudelaire. He had all the Frenchman's appreciation of a sexy woman and all the Frenchman's ego to think he was the one to seduce her. He would pull his chair next to hers, one elbow on the table, the other arm resting on her chair's back and whisper to her. Darla would let her eyes get wide as his stories unfolded, stories about rape and death and sinful goings-on. Interspersed among the horrors, Baudelaire would drop compliments about her creamy skin, her golden hair, her tiny waist. When she'd had enough, she would flash a look to Angelus who would come over to make sounds like a jealous lover, grab her away and then they would move out into the night to do their real business.

"I should just eat him," Angelus said one day.

"No, don't," Darla said, "It would make your head ache for days, all the cheap wine and absinthe he drinks. Besides, I like his poetry."

Baudelaire liked his own poetry, too. As he sat with Darla reciting his creations, he would also tell her of the insults the "respectable" newspapers hurled at him. He was outrageous! An offense to civilization! He insinuated, placing his hand over hers, that only a woman such as herself, brave and free, could understand him. Darla would slip her hand away and say, "Recite some more."

One day he brought her something special, something new.

**Metamorphoses of a Vampire**

Meanwhile, from her red mouth the woman, in husky tones,  
Twisting her body like a serpent upon hot stones  
And straining her white breasts from their imprisonment,  
Let fall these words, as potent as a heavy scent:  
"My lips are moist and yielding, and I know the way  
To keep the antique demon of remorse at bay.  
All sorrows die upon my bosom. I can make  
Old men laugh happily as children for my sake.  
For him who sees me naked in my tresses, I  
Replace the sun, the moon, and all the stars of the sky!  
Believe me, learned sir, I am so deeply skilled  
That when I wind a lover in my soft arms, and yield  
My breasts like two ripe fruits for his devouring-both  
Shy and voluptuous, insatiable and loath-  
Upon his bed that groans and sighs luxuriously  
Even the impotent angels would be damned for me!"

When she drained me of my very marrow, and cold  
And weak, I turned to give her one more kiss-behold,  
There at my side was nothing but a hideous  
Putrescent thing, all faceless and exuding pus.  
I closed my eyes and mercifully swooned till day:  
Who seemed to have replenished her arteries from my own,  
The wan, disjointed fragments of a skeleton  
Wagged up and down in a new posture where she had lain;  
Rattling with each convulsion like a weathervane  
Or an old sign that creaks upon its bracket, right  
Mournfully in the wind upon a winter's night.

Darla didn't care much for the "putrescent thing" and "exuding pus" parts, but smiled indulgently at the poet who looked at her for approval as though he were a dog who'd brought a fresh dead squirrel to his master. Darla and Angelus quoted it to each other for years afterward.

Angel remembers all this, looking at the painting, "La Musique Aux Tuileries". And maybe, as a fleeting thought, regrets that he never made in to one of the Impressionists works. He never got to see what he looked like in muttonchops.

Translated by Edna St. Vincent Millay


End file.
